The Demon's Tales: In the Temple of Ares
by Adara Olson
Summary: First book in the series 'Demon's Tales'. When Ares goes out for a ride in the desert, he doesn't expect to see a woman standing in the middle of nowhere. He doesn't expect for her to know him by name. He doesn't expect her to read him tales written upon her face. And he definitely doesn't expect to learn of a world that even the gods have never seen.
1. In the Desert

**A/N: Hey all! It's been a while since I've had anything new up, but this demanded to be written. I'm not giving up on Escapee, I promise, but you know how I get with updates. This one has come easier to me. So, here goes!**

**Disclaimer: All characters except for Demon belong to either Rick Riordan or the incredible genius of Catherine M. Valente. READ HER BOOK 'the orphan's tales', it's the most incredible thing I've ever read in my LIFE.**

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In the Desert

ARES HADN'T INTENDED TO COME ACROSS ANYBODY when he decided to take his chariot out in motorcycle form and take a ride through the Mojave desert. It was midsummer, and any sane human being was safely tucked away in an air-conditioned building. Therefore, he was understandably surprised when he zoomed past a blurred human figure at about three hundred miles per hour.

Ares slowed, stopped, turned around, and made his way back to it, curious. He carefully strapped his sunglasses back on, just in case the human was, well... _human_.

It was a girl: She looked to be maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, with skin pale as ivory and marble. Her hair shone most peculiarly in the summer sun, like the smooth skin of a salamander. It was pitch black and hung down past her knees. She stood there like a stone pillar as he swung off his motorcycle and approached her slowly. Her head was down, staring at the dusty ground. He couldn't see her face.

She didn't move as he approached her.

"Hey, are you all right?" he asked. "It's dangerous out here."

No answer.

Ares frowned, starting to get a bit concerned for the sake of this mortal woman. "Hey, girl. I'm talkin' to you. Can you hear me?"

She nodded once.

"Can you talk?"

Nod.

"What's your name?"

The girl lifted her head, slowly, and he nearly jumped back in horror at the sight of her face.

It had been tattooed with thick, dark lines of deepest black, tracing over her face and eyelids like a painting. Her eyes, however, were the most terrifying: black as a starless night, so dark they seemed to have no pupils at all. She looked at him straight in the eyes, and Ares had the most peculiar feeling that she was staring into his soul. Her gaze burned through him like fire.

"Who... who are you?" he asked, much shakier than he would have cared to admit.

The faintest of smiles graced her face, though it was cold and sinister. She bowed from the waist, not so deep as to truly be respectful, but not high enough to be informal. "Lord Ares, I am Demon."

Ares blinked. "How do you know my name?" he asked.

"I know a great deal more than your name," she said.

"Is your name really Demon?"

"No."

"Will you tell me your real name?"

"Perhaps. In time."

"What's on your face?" he blurted, then promptly regretted it. After all, it was none of his business, and it looked painful.

The woman was unconcerned. "Spells and words," she said, "the history of all things upon my skin, scorched marks on my face like the tattoos of sailors. The verses and songs are so great in number and so closely written that they appear as one long, unbroken streak of jet on my skin. But they are the words of the river and the marsh, the lake and the wind. Together, they make a great magic."

He blinked. "What are they?"

"Tales," she said simply. "Stories."

Ares frowned, hesitantly. Something about the woman called to him. Her face, proud and angular and vain, was so exotic with its dark tattoos. Two long, curved lines traced her jawline and pulled up past the corners of her mouth, pointed like a boar's tusks. Her body was flawless, no denying it, and she was so different than the painted, vain women that he knew so well. He had never wanted somebody quite so badly, but he knew, somehow, that he couldn't have her. No, what called him to her were the stories, the promise of a tale of a faraway land and heroes and wars and blood that sang to him like a thousand rivers. "Will you tell me one?" he asked, as hesitant as a child. "Please... just one. Just a taste."

The woman's smile was secretive but kind as she answered. "Listen, then," she said quietly, sitting on the burning sand as though it didn't affect her at all. He sat beside her, conjuring a tree to shade them as she spoke.

"It has been a long time since I told a story," she said. "They are all I have, and I am happy to share them."

She closed her eyes. "I will tell you the first tale I ever learned," she said quietly.

Ares sat very still, listening like a silk-eared hare deep in the forest.

"Once in a far away there was a restless Prince, who was not satisfied by his father's riches, or the beauty of the Palace women, or the diversions of the banquet hall. This Prince was called Leander, after the tawny lion that bounds across the steppes like a fearful wind. One night he crept out of the vine-covered walls of the great Castle like a hawk on the hunt, to find a quest and silence the gnaw of discontent in his breast..."


	2. The Tale of the Prince and the Goose

**A/N: Hey all! It's a lovely day here in the Pyrenees, not an ounce of rain except for that giant hailstorm we had the other day. I am in a world of pain because my horse threw me and I landed this gods-awful blow to my spine. I can walk now, but riding still hurts and I can't dance, which sucks because I have a four-day workshop coming up where I will be dancing 7 hours a day... FML.**

**Anyway, enjoy!**

**I don't own, again.**

**Love,**

**Adara**

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The Tale of the Prince and the Goose

Now the prince stole into the night, the shadows wrapping around him like slippery river eels, and his footfalls were black and soundless on the pine needles. He journeyed thought the forest, stars flooding overhead as though they had burst through some gilded dam, having no particular plan except to get as far from the Palace as possible before the sun rose up and his father's hounds were set on his scent. The trees made a roof of many tiles over his head, a scented mosaic studded with blue clouds. For the first time in his young life, the Prince felt a fierce kind of happiness, rimmed with light.

As dawn swept up behind him like a clever thief, he rested against the trunk of a great baobab leaning his head against the knotted wood. He breakfasted on cheese and dried meat he had stolen from the kitchens. The salt of the meat was more delicious than anything he had ever tasted, and he slept for a few hours under the sky which bloomed in the colors of wisteria and lilies.

Traveling on, it was not long before he came to a little hut in a pleasant meadow with a thatched roof and a well-made wooden door, round with solid brass studs. The chimney smoked cheerily, smelling of sage and cedar. Milling around the house was a flock of gray-feathered geese, circling like cirrus clouds, ethereal and wild. They were very fine animals and beautiful, squawking and ruffling their feathers under the curling eaves of camphor and fresh straw.

Now the prince was young and resourceful, but not very wise, and he had taken only a little food from the kitchens and a few apples from the orchards. He had assumed that he could forage easily, for the whole world must be as fertile as his father's lands, and all trees must be as fertile as his father's lands, and all trees must be as full of jeweled fruit, all animals as docile and savory, all peasants as agreeable and generous. It was beginning to be clear that this might not be the case, and his stomach growled noisily. He resolved to replenish his pack before he went further. There were, after all, so many geese, and certainly whatever warm and festive creatures dwelt in that fine hut, they would not even notice if one of the long-necked animals disappeared.

The Prince had been trained to hunt and sneak from his earliest childhood, and he crept silently on well-muscled thighs from his hiding place. He stole behind a great plow and waited among the high summer grasses, searching for the right moment, controlling his breathing and slowing his hammering heart. The midmorning sun was hot on his neck. His hair crawled with sweat, trickling down into his collar, but he did not move at all until, finally, one of the lovely geese wandered away from the pack, peering around the blade of the plow and fixing him with wide black eyes. Her gaze was very strange, endless and deep as the autumn moon, pupilless and knowing.

But swift as a sleek wolf, the Prince escaped her gaze. He caught her slender neck in his hand and snapped it, the sound no louder than a twig caught underfoot. He rose from the dry grass and moved back towards the tree line, but the geese had noticed that one of their number was missing, and sent up a great alarm, terrible and piercing.

The door of the hut flew open and out stomped a fearful woman, a flurry of streaming gray hair and glinting axe blade. Her face was wide and flat, covered with horrible and arcane markings, great black tattoos and scars cutting across her features so that it was impossible to tell if she had once been beautiful. She wore a wide leather belt studded with silver, two long knives glittering at her hips. She screamed horribly and the sound of it shook the cypresses and the oaks, vibrating in the air like a shattered flute.

"What have you done? What have you done? Awful, awful boy!–Villain, Demon!" She screeched again, higher and shriller than any owl, and the geese joined her, keening and wailing. Their howls gouged at the air, at the rich red earth, a sound both monstrous and alien, full of inhuman, bottomless grief. It dug at his ears like claws.

Finally, the woman quieted and simply shook her great head, weeping. The prince stood, stunned, more chagrined over his lack of stealth than her rage. She was, after all, only a woman, and it was only a bird. She was dwarfish and no longer young, and he knew he had nothing to fear from her. He clutched the bird's corpse behind his back, hoping his broad chest and arms would hide it.

"I have only just stumbled upon your house, Lady. I meant no offense." The wretched woman loosed her awful scream again, and her eyes grew hideously large. He had not noticed their yellowish cast before, but it was certainly there now, feral and sickly.

"You lie, you lie! You have killed my goose, my beautiful bird, my child! She was mine and you broke her neck! My darling, my child!" She broke into bitter weeping. The Prince did not understand. He drew the goose's body from behind his back to hold it out to the crone.

But in his fist he held not a bird, but a radiant young woman, small and delicate as a crane poised in the water, long black hair like a coiled serpent winding around his hand, for he clutched her at the root of the braided mane. She was clothed in diaphinous rags which barely covered her shimmering limbs. And her long, smooth neck was neatly broken.

The tattooed woman ran at him, swinging her axe like a scythe though wheat, and he dropped the girl's body with a horrible thump onto the grass. When she reached him, she stopped short and breathed hard into his face, stinking of rotted plums and dark, secret mosses. She lifted her axe and cut off two fingers on the Prince's left hand, licking the spray of blood from her cracked lips. He could not run, the blow was so sudden and complete, but only cry out and clutch his maimed hand. He knew if he bolted from her he would lose much more than a finger. He promised the crone a thousand thousand kingdoms, the treasures of a hundred dragons, babbling oaths like a child. But she would have none of it, and slowly moved her free hand to one of the long knives.

"You have killed my child, my only daughter."

She laid her ponderous axe on the damp earth and drew, with one long sinuous sigh, the bright bladed knife from its sheath-

The woman paused, and looked into her companions eyes, which had long since lost their coverings, staring unafraid at the fire-filled sockets.

"Don't stop!" he choked. "Tell me! Did she kill him then and there?"

"It is night, my Lord. You must go in to your temples and I must make my bed among the burning sand. Each to our own."

Ares gaped, grasping frantically for a reason to stay and hear the fate of the wounded Prince. Hurriedly, he murmured. "Wait, wait. You can come with me! I have an extra room, and I can get you food, and stay the night with you. Then you can finish the story there!" He looked at her with a hope whose fierceness was brighter even than the fires of his eyes.

She was quiet for a moment, head bowed like a temple postulant.

Finally, she nodded, without looking up.

"Very well."


End file.
